The return of the whinging composer

…and I am not even whinging about actual composition yet, just the tools. Oy.

You will recall that MakeMusic pulled life support on Finale after 30 years and I’ve been procrastinating on getting up to speed on either of the two most-touted replacements, MuseScore and Dorico.

I decided to set up a trial to see how far I could get into a project wherein I would import an .xml file from Finale into both programs and try to do what I needed to do without having to look up every step, i.e., how barebones intuitive would each program be?

My target file was the “Agnus Dei/Dona Nobis Pacem” from the Fragments of a Mass in C, and I had two basic goals: import the file and resize it to 9”x12” for a standard choir folder size; and add text block stage directions for my cheesy-but-effective lighting ideas.

First up: MuseScore.

MuseScore opened the .xml file fine with no real surprises. It resized the pages to concert size appropriately.

However, it would not play the piece at Adagio = 66, not even when I dug down into MuseScore’s indigenous tempo settings. Strike 1.

The biggie is that MuseScore cannot place random, positional, resizable text blocks where I need to add them, i.e., under the score at specific measures. Every instruction I could find said to click on the score wherever and MuseScore would add a page-wide text block at the top of the score at the beginning. It could not be moved or resized.

One more thing: I was invited to buy/download/install this new orchestral/choral music file, and I did. It was not exactly cheap, but I sprang for it. At no point am I sure that MuseScore is actually referencing those sounds in the playback. (In Finale, there are obvious places where you tell the program which sound files to use for playback.)

On to Dorico

Dorico had basically the same issues: opened the file fine, resized the page size, and then there were no random, positional, resizable text blocks.

(Both Dorico and MuseScore have extremely unwieldy adjunct programs in which you are supposed to “manage” your “account.” You can’t download or install any of the extras — and they are legion — without going through these outside programs, which themselves usually demand to be opened and updated before you can write a single note of music.)

So back to Finale

In the hopes of maybe getting Finale to lay out the text blocks and then export a PDF of the score, I pulled up my original file.

Immediately it was clear that Finale has already begun its slow decay with the minimal system updates I’ve allowed MacBook Pro to do. (Upgrading to the newest OS would totally bork Finale, so I’m putting it off.) The music spacing was completely screwed up and unfixable: lyrics just crashed into each other and the note spacing could not be forced into spreading itself out appropriately.

The text block tool was still there, and those worked as expected.

Then mystery staves show up on p. 2: they overlaid the existing piano staves, and even when I forced the staves to redistance themselves, the blank staves were unselectable and undeletable. They appeared on no other page.

The deathblow this time is that Finale won’t print the concert-size score to PDF despite changing paper size repeatedly; I could not convince Finale that I was not printing to my Brother printer but to disk as PDF.

I tried to export the file as an epub, but then converting the epub to pdf online loses the noteheads — there’s no music there.

So, I’m defeated.

Thanks, Finale.